In the 21st century, humankind is assigning a value on an extension line of reality beyond simple information exchange through the World Wide Web, and requiring the development of a sensuous aspect. With the improvement of a worldwide cultural level, the availability of virtual spaces is rapidly developing. With the development of virtual spaces, requirements are increasing.
Accordingly, virtual space service providers using the Internet provide various services proper for preference of each user, not an existing monolithic service, and provide a service capable of forming various types of virtual spaces by compositely providing two-dimensional (2D) and three-dimensional (3D) virtual spaces. The service providers are providing a service in which a conversation between users is possible using avatars representing the users, such that user-desired information can be acquired from a virtual space visited by a user.
For example, a representative virtual world service that has commercially succeeded is “Second Life®”. Second Life® is a web-based 3D virtual world service that can lead the life of a virtual world through an avatar as an incarnation of a user. Creation and transaction as well as communication between avatars are possible within the virtual space.
A second-generation Social Networking Service (SNS), as a new type of community like Second Life®, is rising as a new profit model attracting a large number of subscribers. The service providers make relations to other persons by converting all records of the subscribers into tags, thereby providing several thousands of applications to the subscribers.
Another example is an Internet blog. The Internet blog, which is a virtual space for freely exchanging news and opinions between users without temporal-spatial restriction, has rapidly developed by providing a new type of personal meeting in the modern society. Recently, tremendous profits are being made in various profit models such as advertisements, avatars, shopping malls, and the like.
Specifically, an avatar-related technology has been extended to a spatial concept in avatar decoration. It is a trend that the demand of the second-generation avatar technology using the spatial concept is explosively increasing to meet desires of netizens (e.g., network citizens) who want to express their own creative identities. The use of avatars as described above is flexible in terms of content and practical in terms of a function. The use of avatars has contributed to blog activation by improving the monotony and identity of a conventional blog in which enjoyment and real-time property are deficient.
In a personal web space or a specific community space among Internet community spaces provided with avatars, users usually access a community space of other persons or a specific community space to acquire information. In this case, service providers provide only one-way communication, not two-way communication, in a personal web space or a specific community space. For example, a user of a personal web space cannot know the fact that his/her own web space is accessed by other persons while the other persons acquire information by accessing the personal web space, and immediate two-way communication is not possible.
In a messenger system or SNS like Second Life®, immediate two-way communication, that is immediate interaction that may check access of a counterpart and check and acquire necessary information in real time, is possible, but no connection ring with an existing web space or specific community space is formed. First, in the messenger system, the immediate two-way communication is possible, but an additional program is installed in a personal communication terminal and desired information may be acquired through communication with a counterpart when mutual communication is performed.
Next, in the SNS, the user recognizes a counterpart using his/her own avatar. Thus, it can be ensured that they exist in the same web space in real time. However, since the SNS is a scheme using an avatar of the user as an immediate interaction tool, necessary information may not be acquired before the information is acquired through communication with an avatar of the counterpart. When the counterpart opens a personal web space and stores necessary information in the web space, an inconvenience exists in that an information location is found along a path provided from a map service for the personal web space of the counterpart so as to acquire necessary information from the personal web space of the counterpart.
To solve the above-described inconvenience, there is needed a system in which two-way interaction between users having access to the same Uniform Resource Locator (URL) is possible when a specific user accesses personal web spaces of other persons.